April 15, 2009

Summary - Ten BE DiFFERENT Practices to Renew your Organization

BE DiFFERENT Renewal Practices

Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practice #2 - Focus. Focus. Focus.
Practice #3 - Modify your Business Processes
Practice #4 - Cut the Crap
Practice #5 - Be Anal about Execution
Practice #6 - Set Cost Objectives
Practice #7 - Plan on the Run
Practice #8 - Customerize your Marketing Efforts
Practice #9 - Dazzle your customers
Practice #10 - Sell Intimate Relationships, Don’t Flog Products

Adopt these Practices and you will prepare your organization for growth and long term prosperity.

Cheers, Roy Osing

Blogs in the BE DiFFERENT Practice Series:
Introduction
Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practices #2, #3 and #4 - Focus, Modify Business Processes and Cut the Crap
Practices #5 and #6 - Be Anal about Execution and Set Cost Objectives
Practices #7 and #8 - Plan on the Run and Customerize your Marketing
Practices #9 and #10 - Dazzle your Customers and Sell Intimate Relationships

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Posted 4.15.09 at 05:37 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 9, 2009

BE DiFFERENT Practices #9 and #10 - Renew your Organization

BE DiFFERENT Practice #9 - Dazzle your customers

Just as it is essential to Customerize your marketing efforts, the need to enhance the customer experience is equally essential in cutting through the competitive clutter to attract and hold loyal customers.

First of all, change your orientation to reflect a concerted focus on customer service. If you service customers, change your attitude to serving them. Accepting that customers are in the control position is healthy and naturally orients you to the ‘survival’ position.

On the other hand, continuing to service customers with policies that you have developed to serve the organization will hasten your demise. Each customer is an individual; no two are alike (if you don’t believe this, you haven’t looked closely enough).

It then follows that you need to vary the way you serve each one - serving them all in the same way and the level of customer satisfaction will vary; serving each one in a different special way and customer satisfaction will reach dazzling levels.

There are four BE DiFFERENT ways to create a dazzling customer experience:

- hire human being ‘lovers’ in frontline positions: people that don’t like humans can’t dazzle anyone!
- allow people to bend your internal rules on the customer’s behalf: enforcing internal rules will enrage customers
- kill ‘dumb rules’: get rid of policies that don’t make sense to customers
- create a service recovery culture: fix it and do the unexpected is the major source of customer loyalty

If you are dazzling customers they will have no reason to leave you for another offer. If you’re not, they will leave you in a heartbeat—especially in a down economy.

BE DiFFERENT Practice #10 - Sell Intimate Relationships, Don’t Flog Products

The one thing you don’t want to do when times are tough is decrease the amount of time you invest in preserving strong relationships with the customers you have decided to serve.

Flogging products make you like everyone else and eventually reduces to a price game where customers win (but will go elsewhere for even lower prices) but you don’t. Not Fair!

In combination with the other BE DiFFERENT practices we have discussed here, ensure you deepen the relationships with your customers: help solve their problems, create unique solutions for them, be available 24/7 to help, follow up constantly with them, show then that you honestly care about their issues and be a partner to them, not a supplier. Return on this investment is huge!

Oh, and will you generate revenue as a result?

How many times have you personally rewarded a company for their caring attitude, superb problem solving and high quality solution by buying something from them? I rest my case.

There you have it: Ten BE DiFFERENT practices that will definitely not only help you successfully meet challenging economic times, they will also put your organization on a growth trajectory for long term success.
Stay tuned for more.

Cheers, Roy Osing

Blogs in the BE DiFFERENT Practice Series:
Introduction
Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practices #2, #3 and #4 - Focus, Modify Business Processes and Cut the Crap
Practices #5 and #6 - Be Anal about Execution and Set Cost Objectives
Practices #7 and #8 - Plan on the Run and Customerize your Marketing
Practices #9 and #10 - Dazzle your Customers and Sell Intimate Relationships

Follow me on Twitter

Posted 4.9.09 at 05:15 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 7, 2009

BE DiFFERENT Practices #7 and #8 - Renew your Organization

A volatile economic presents an opportunity for organizations to renew themselves. This is the fifth instalment of the series that explains how to do it.

BE DiFFERENT Practice #7 - Plan on the Run

Once your execution efforts begin, it is important that you carefully monitor the results you are achieving. I recommend that you develop performance metrics and monitor them on a weekly basis. During recessionary times you can’t afford monthly results tracking; you need immediate feedback so that remedial action can be taken if results fall below expectations.

The Plan on the Run formula is: Plan - Execute - Learn - Adjust - back to Plan. Don’t get fooled to believe that your renewal plan will go as planned. There are always unforeseen events that happen and execution parameters that fall short that require you to make adjustments to your plan on the run. Learn from your ongoing results and adjust your plan accordingly.

BE DiFFERENT Practice #8 - Customerize your Marketing Efforts

Declining customer demand, more rigorous researching by customers before making a purchase decision, acute price sensitivity, expected value for the buck, and intensifying competition are the challenges facing the marketer in an economic downturn.

These ‘business as unusual’ market factors require a DiFFERENT approach to marketing. Marketing 101 is largely a product-centric world where one tries to sell as many products to as many potential customers possible. Customerized marketing, on the other hand, seeks to understand the deep intimate requirements of smaller groups of customers and provide packaged offers that reflect the broad holistic needs of customers in the chosen customer set.

The whole premise of Customerized Marketing is to customize and personalize the Offers to make them as relevant and compelling as you can to the customer and avoid flogging the features and benefits of a narrowly defined product to a more mass market. Unique Offers that have personal relevance and a strong value proposition will definitely be more successful than common products supplied by a number of competing companies.

Stay tuned for more. Cheers, Roy Osing

Blogs in the BE DiFFERENT Practice Series:
Introduction
Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practices #2, #3 and #4 - Focus, Modify Business Processes and Cut the Crap
Practices #5 and #6 - Be Anal about Execution and Set Cost Objectives
Practices #7 and #8 - Plan on the Run and Customerize your Marketing
Practices #9 and #10 - Dazzle your Customers and Sell Intimate Relationships

Follow me on Twitter

Posted 4.7.09 at 05:14 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)

April 5, 2009

BE DiFFERENT Practices #5 and #6 - Renew your Organization

Challenging economic times present an opportunity for organizations to renew themselves. This is the fourth instalment of the series that explains how to do it.

BE DiFFERENT Practice #5 - Be Anal about Execution

Tough language for a critical renewal practice. Nothing happens and no progress is made
unless your plan degenerates into action. In times of renewal—when timing of making changes is going to make or break you—if you can’t execute, you won’t survive.

In order to get the focus on execution, create the Strategy Hawk role in your organization and appoint the most persistent, tenacious, detailed and follow-up obsessed person you have and turn them loose. Empower them to do whatever it takes to see that relentless execution of your renewal plan happens, and give them the power to act decisively and with authority.

Ideally, the leader of the business should assume the role:  after all, is there a more important use of their time than working on the survival of their organization? You tell me. 

BE DiFFERENT Practice #6 - Set Cost Objectives

Expense control and cost cutting is critical to organizational renewal. Be careful though as general across-the-board type cost cutting can cause more problems than it cures. As stated earlier, new business processes should be a major determinant of operating expense management but in addition you need to determine the size of the cost envelope you can afford.

The BE DiFFERENT cost equation can be very helpful guiding you to decide how much you can afford to spend on operating costs during your renew period. The equation is: COST = REVENUE - PROFIT.

First, determine the revenue you intend to generate in your plan (HOW BIG work you did earlier); second, decide on the profit you would like to take away; finally, take the difference to yield the resultant cost target. If revenues are $10 and profit expectations are $2 then the affordable cost target is $8. That is, you can only afford to spend $8 operating your business.

With this cost envelope in mind, you are now in a position to allocate costs out to those critical activities integral to your renewal plan.

Stay tuned for more. Cheers, Roy Osing

Blogs in the BE DiFFERENT Practice Series:
Introduction
Practice #1 - Renew your Strategy
Practices #2, #3 and #4 - Focus, Modify Business Processes and Cut the Crap
Practices #5 and #6 - Be Anal about Execution and Set Cost Objectives
Practices #7 and #8 - Plan on the Run and Customerize your Marketing
Practices #9 and #10 - Dazzle your Customers and Sell Intimate Relationships

Follow me on Twitter

Posted 4.5.09 at 05:12 pm by Roy Osing | Permalink | Comments (0)